Discovery

War and conflict turns lives upside down and millions of adults and children witness atrocities, lose loved ones and often lose their homes and even their countries. The psychological and emotional suffering can continue long after the immediate threat to their life has gone. One in every five people touched by war – that’s 20% - will have a mental health problem that needs help and one in twenty...

Steve Brusatte analyses the pace of evolutionary change and tries to answer big questions. Why did the dinosaurs die out and the mammals survive? How did dinosaurs evolve into birds? If you met a Velociraptor today you’d probably mistake it for a large flightless bird, says Steve. His intense interest in T. rex, Triceratops and all the other dinosaur species developed when he was a teenager and co...

Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is responsible for a revolution in medicine. The method he invented for reading, at speed, the unique genetic code that makes each one of us who we are, is ten million times faster than the technology that was used in the human genome project at the turn of the century. What’s more, it can be done much more cheaply than before and on a desktop machine. And it’s transfor...

We look at wolves and the programme is a little different, because the predator we’re talking about is very much a predator of our imaginations. Wolves are the spirit of the wilderness, but they also symbolize the darker side of human nature, and many myths and legends surround the wolf from all around the world. Our fear of the wolf may be primeval, but it is still very much alive and well. The i...

The army ant might be small enough to squash under foot but, make no mistake, it’s a formidable predator. When they club together in their thousands they are a force to be reckoned with. Picture a tiger, comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny ant-sized units, prowling through the forest and you start to get the idea. They’ll take down anything in their path, from spiders and scorpions to chick...

Adam Hart discovers why rattlesnakes make good mothers and how deadly their venom is. There are over 600 different species of venomous snakes around the world with fearsome fangs delivering deadly venoms. Up to a third of the world’s population lives in fear of snakes, but are these reptiles misunderstood? And while Adam living in the UK where there are very few snakes, finds them fascinating, we...

Today, Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts focus on what’s been called “the silent pandemic”, the threat to modern medicine of anti-microbial resistance or AMR. Infections are increasingly resistant to live-saving drugs like antibiotics and many believe the very future of modern medicine is hanging in the balance. In a series produced in collaboration with Wellcome Collection, this edition of...

Cursed as a worthless scavenger and cast as villainous cowardly sidekicks in Disney’s The Lion King, the spotted hyena is one of the world’s most misunderstood of all predators. It may scavenge at night on a giant rubbish tip on the outskirts of Mekelle in Ethiopia, but it earns it’s top predator status when it takes down its prey in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. Adam Hart and guests polish...

UCL oceanographer Helen Czerski explores life in the ocean depths with a panel of deep sea biologists. They take us to deep ocean coral gardens on sea mounts, to extraordinary hydrothermal vent ecosystems teeming with weird lifeforms fed by chemosynthetic microbes, to the remarkable biodiversity in the muds of the vast abyssal plains. Helen's guests are Adrian Glover of the Natural History Museum...

In 2021, Captain James Kirk, aka William Shatner, popped into space for real for a couple of minutes, transported by space company Blue Origin's tourist rocket New Shepard. Elon Musk's Space X ferried more astronauts and supplies between Earth and the International Space Station, using its revolutionary reusable launchers and Dragon spacecraft. On Mars, the latest Nasa robot rover landed and relea...

Professor Tom Kariuki has spent his career battling for science in Africa, both as a leading immunologist and as the former director of the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa. Now, as the world comes to grips with the coronavirus pandemic and a global movement for social justice, could this prove an opportunity for the transformation of African science? Tom talks to leading...

In a special edition of The Evidence, Claudia Hammond and her panel of experts focus on Africa, on how the more than fifty countries on the continent, home to 1.3 billion people and the most youthful population in the world, have fared, two years into the pandemic. African scientists have been key players in the global response, sequencing variants of the virus and sharing this vital information w...

Whilst watching a documentary about some poisonous frogs, Curio Janni in Amsterdam, started to wonder what would happen if a frog licked itself or another frog of the same species. She asks Dr Adam Rutherford and Professor Hannah Fry to investigate whether an animal would react badly to a toxin it itself produces? In essence 'can a venomous snake kill itself by biting itself?' Of course the answer...

'What is the slipperiest thing in the world?' asks 8 year old Evelyn? 'Why do my feet slip on a wet floor but when my feet are even slightly moist it's nearly impossible to put on a pair of socks without falling over and cursing the universe. What is going on here?' asks Evelyn's Dad, Sam. Hannah and Adam investigate the science of friction and lubrication - so called 'tribology' with the help of...

Dr Mitch Lomax is a sports scientist at the University of Portsmouth. She helps actual Olympic swimmers get faster. She explains how most of the muscles attached to our skeletons work: Tiny fibres use small-scale cellular energy, which, when all these fibres work in concert, turns into visible muscular movement. Mitch also explains how the dreaded Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, or DOMS, can hit, t...

“I don’t really understand why water has so many properties on different scales ranging from very large and cosmic to very small quantum and quarky - Could you help by zooming in and out on water to explain what is known about it? Asks Neil Morton in Stirling. “Why does boiling water sound different to cold water?’ asks Barbara Dyson in Brittany in France Ollie Gordon, in Christchurch in New Zeala...

“I don’t really understand why water has so many properties on different scales ranging from very large and cosmic to very small quantum and quarky - Could you help by zooming in and out on water to explain what is known about it? Asks Neil Morton in Stirling. Rutherford and Fry learn about the special hydrogen bonds that makes water such an unusual liquid. Quantum physicist Professor Patricia Hun...

Everybody hopes that the new super-charged Omicron variant of coronavirus will be less severe, but even if it is, it’s spreading so fast and infecting so many people, health services around the world could still buckle under the strain. Two years into the pandemic, Claudia Hammond is joined by two world-leading scientists to discuss the impact of Omicron and to review what the world has got right...

Dogs and humans have gone paw in hand for thousands of years. Historic and genetic evidence shows we’ve shaped each other's existence over millennia. But dogs were only first trained as guides for blind people in the UK 90 years ago. What’s the biology behind this extraordinary partnership? Hannah heads to Guide Dogs UK’s training school in Royal Leamington Spa. She meets up with expert Graham Ken...

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is only days away. Scheduled for lift off on 22 December, the largest and most complex space observatory ever built will be sent to an orbit beyond the moon. James Webb is so huge that it has had to be folded up to fit in the rocket. There will be a tense two weeks over Christmas and the New Year as the space giant unfurls and unfolds. Its design and co...

CRISPR is the latest and most powerful technique for changing the genetic code of living things. This method of gene editing is already showing great promise in treating people with gene-based diseases, from sickle cell disease to cancer. However, in 2018 the use of CRISPR to edit the genes of two human embryos, which were subsequently born as two girls in China, caused outrage. The experiment was...

Professor Matthew Cobb looks at how genetic engineering became big business - from the first biotech company that produced human insulin in modified bacteria in the late 1970s to the companies like Monsanto which developed and then commercialised the first GM crops in the 1990s. Were the hopes and fears about these products of genetic engineering realised? Thanks to The State of Things from North...

As all eyes have been on the virus, other serious killer diseases took a backseat. Resources and staff were diverted, lockdowns were common all over the world and a very real fear of Covid-19 kept people away from clinics and hospitals. Claudia Hammond and her expert panel from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America look at the devastating impact of the pandemic on illnesses other than Covid, on g...

Biologist Matthew Cobb presents the first episode in a series which looks at the 50-year history of genetic engineering, from the concerns around the first attempts at combining the DNA of one organism with the genes of another in 1971 to today’s gene editing technique known as CRISPR. The first experiments to combine the DNA of two different organisms began at Stanford University in California in...

Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, and also some of the noisiest. Up close, a healthy reef teems with trills, whoops, buzzes, hums and snaps made by the diverse lifeforms that inhabit it. But as many reefs are now degrading due to rising temperatures, their sound signatures are changing. Conservationist Rory Crawford meets marine scientists who believe these sounds c...